Type Conversion - Eiffel

Eiffel

In Eiffel the notion of type conversion is integrated into the rules of the type system. The Assignment Rule says that an assignment, such as:

is valid if and only if the type of its source expression, y in this case, is compatible with the type of its target entity, x in this case. In this rule, compatible with means that the type of the source expression either conforms to or converts to that of the target. Conformance of types is defined by the familiar rules for polymorphism in object-oriented programming. For example, in the assignment above, the type of y conforms to the type of x if the class upon which y is based is a descendant of that upon which x is based.